In a hospital setting, laundered items (such as clean bedding materials and surgical scrubs) are typically used at the hospital, collected, and then picked up by a laundry service to be laundered outside of the hospital. The items are then returned, clean and folded, to the hospital for reuse.
One problem with this arrangement is the amount of laundry that any particular hospital uses can fluctuate dramatically from day to day. Accordingly, laundry services typically have no way of knowing how much laundry they will receive for processing on any given day. As a result, the laundry service must typically assume that it will receive a large amount of items for processing, and staff accordingly. This can result in wasted labor on days when the amount of items received from its client hospitals is relatively small. Alternatively, the laundry service may always assume that they will receive an average amount of items each day, and then arrange for overtime help on particularly busy days. This arrangement is also expensive and can be stressful to implement.
In addition, most laundry services typically bill hospitals and hospital departments based on the weight of the items received from the hospital or hospital department, which is measured after the items arrive at the laundry facility. Because the items are weighed in bulk, the hospital or hospital department is typically simply billed a weight-based charge for the processing of all items received from the hospital or department. This can create difficulties from a budgetary standpoint in the common situation where members of a particular hospital department retrieve items from a different department within the same hospital. In this situation, processing charges (e.g., laundry processing charges) are often charged to the incorrect department.
Accordingly, there is a need for improved item processing systems (especially laundry processing systems) that, for example, address the issues discussed above.